Founder and former CEO of Square Hisashi Suzuki has damned the company’s merger with Enix as a “total failure,” declaring Square Enix has “no vision for the future” and pointing to its huge losses and a market cap which is now well below the company’s pre-merger valuation as evidence of the disaster.

Hisashi Suzuki, one of Square’s founders and its CEO until 2004, and now a top executive at Rakuten, let rip in a recent Tweet:

A market cap of ¥124 billion [$154 million]. It was ¥150 billion [$185 million] even before the merger with Enix.

The merger was a total failure. There is no vision for the future there.

From April to September, Square Enix Holdings posted a 5.4 billion yen net loss, much of it development expenses.

228 Comments

The failure has nothing to do with the merger and everything to do with the fact that they don’t put out what would obviously be their best sellers in a timely manner. They put their top titles on the backburners for ridiculous reasons. FFvsXIII and Kingdom Hearts 3 should have been released by now, for example. Instead FFvsXIII has been no where in sight for years and the Kingdom Hearts series has been spread out through un-needed mini-sequels over several systems.

Any other company selling products would have the sense to put their best sellers and hero products as a first priority. I’m not saying to sacrifice quality by chucking them out faster than necessary, but with some of these games they are obviously wasting time.

Step 1: See an awesome company.
Step 2: Wait for them to get into some financial trouble, which happens from time to time, what with risk and all.
Step 3: Promise them the moon just so long as they’ll sign onto the merger.
Step 4: Loot
Step 5: ????
Step 6: Profit! …for the ceo anyway.

Isn’t that what I have been saying the past 10yrs? It’s sad tri-Ace got dragged into this madness, their partnership with Enix was really better…. as for Final Fantasy, to me it died when the crystals broke on FFV, I think thats when Square became money-mongers (I’m not saying the other FF are bad, I’m just saying they could have named it something else since there’s no elemental crystals, light warriors, etc, etc…)

PRODUCTION COSTS HAVE SKYROCKETED. Quality PS2 games had production budgets in the $7M to $10M range. PS3 and 360 games started at $20M, and some have now surpassed $40M. They are not making 4x the money from sales to compensate for rising production costs.

Square.. I fucking love you guys, but you fucking drove away all of your talented and savvy designers and employees and all you were left with was jackasses who wanted to make portable sequels to Kingdom Hearts and lousy, miserable games that were more cutscene than game, as if you were making some horrible parody of your own products.. Then there was that fucking MMO that you farmed out to some miserable korean sweat shop..

They kicked out alienated all the talent that built that company. The guard of the founders Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and the Xenogears/Chrono Cross team team left before or early merger. Then, they fired Yasumi Matsuno (FFT). All they’ve got left from pre-merger is Tetsuya Nomura.

What they need is a thorough and honest contemplation on what made Square games successful back then. All of this movie-esque CG is only good for making a movie. The typical gameplay of their games has completely drifted off into casual/brain-dead hell. Now it’s only there to look good but play very bad.

Their characters lack charme. Now they only come across as poor imitations of already poorly defined Japanese multimedia figures. Over-styled and soulless, only there to attract the most shallow of consumers.

Their own executives already admitted to be unwilling to invest serious thought and effort into their “games”. We all remember how “towns are too difficult to create”. Deep down, they want to make movies or cinematic fluff. But to be honest ,that’s not going to pull in the gaming industry.

If this ^ is indeed true there is onry one answer….. bring back the old Square Soft team! give them what they ask for if it gets them to come back……. dont you guy fold like lawn chairs on me now xD…. dispite the bad reviews i have enjoyed the new FF titles

If this ^ is indeed the case there is onry one answer…. Bring back the original square soft team! give them what they ask for if it gets them to return.. dont you guys fold like note book paper on me now..xD… but…. i dont see it. i have enjoyed the new FF titles dispite the bad talk from reviews,

Been hearing rumors about their financial situation being this bad for years now…glad it’s finally out. Unfortunately for SE, I don’t think anyone’s going to be stupid enough to bail them out this time…

It would help if they would actually make good games. Lackluster FF’s, too much Kingdom Hearts, dull American properties/styled games. Dragon Quest has been the one bright spot. They need to get back to what made both companies great. They need to breath some life into some of their older series and release games that have the soul that was so present back then. SE has been so banal for so long.

Hello Squaresoft?? The first one to mess up the Company is YOU, with your stupid fu**ing idea of FF The Movie: The Spirits Within, with American collaboration. With a Starship troopers concept like that, even a 10 year old Kid would know that that project is doomed to fail!!! Merger with Enix is just aftereffect, no more.

No, the reason Square Enix is doing bad is the same reason Enix had to buy Squaresoft to save them from Microsoft’s hostile takeover: Squaresoft lost their goddamned minds.

Squaresoft had severe Peter Principle problems. Too many people moved up beyond their competence areas. This problem has continued after the buyout.

But here’s the thing. It’s only the Squaresoft side that has this problem. The Enix side of things is doing fine. Dragon Quest 9 shattered sales records, after 7 and 8 shattered sales records. The monster catcher games are rivaling Pokemon in success, and the hook (“tag mode”) was so successful Nintendo built it into the 3DS. And Dragon Quest X is on par to beat Final Fantasy 11 as the most popular Japanese MMORPG. (In Japan anyway, once things zoom out to China the numbers get fucked.)

In contrast, look at Final Fantasy. They’ve continued to run that into the ground. Yes, Final Fantasy 13-2 was excellent, but it was also overpriced, a bit overdeveloped for a DLC platform, and a bit too late.

What Square Enix’s CEO — Enix’s old CEO — needs to do is clean house. Get the team that did Final Fantasy Four Heroes of Light and Bravely Default. Put them in charge of Final Fantasy 15.

Give them a good budget, but NOT an infinite one. Tell them they are NOT to listen to other people in the company for design decisions (The “Fuck off Nomura” rule). Remind them if they mention the words “Science Fiction” they will be expected to ritualistically disembowel themselves.

Then step back and let them do their thing.

Or if all else fails, get Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama to stop making Dragon Quest games for five minutes and make a new Chrono Trigger game.

It’s not hard. Square Enix has excellent talent. They also have people who have risen beyond their expertise and are bringing the company down.

“is the same reason Enix had to buy Squaresoft to save them from Microsoft’s hostile takeover”

Source or it never happened.

MS NEVER tried to buy Squaresoft. And Sony invested in them when they started going in debt, thanks to that Hollywood POS Spirits Within. Which was before merging with Enix.

IF MS wanted to BUY Squaresoft, they could and there’s NOTHING they could do about it either. After the Dreamcast flopped MS REALLY wanted to buy Sega, but Sega wanted to stay independent, so instead MS paid them to make a couple exclusives for xbox1.

Right there they could have flexed their muscles, but did not. Do you know why? Because they did not want to appear like bullies forcing their way into Japanese homes.

There are a number of Japanese companies with financial trouble, over the last decade MS could have consumed – from Sega, Squaresoft, SNK, Namco, Capcom and probably many more I’m forgetting, but at no point have they tried to forcibly buy any of these companies.

Which is actually unfortunate, because a couple of those companies would have benefited with the kind of funding & freedom MS gave studios like Bungie & Epic. At least then we’d still have a King of Fighters title that could compete against Street Fighter and a Sonic title worth playing.

So in conclusion, you’re a fucking idiot, who knows jack shit about gaming and spreads misinformation.

“Buying Eidos (the dirty European Gaijin) was the best thing we’ve ever done! They’re the only division that makes money for us anymore! They continue to make great games while our Japanese arms push out crap that everyone hates!”

Did he not say anything about how the worth of SE almost jumped to ¥400 billion during the merger? Only reason it’s so low right now is cause of stupid mistakes and rehashes. 2003 peak is probably X-2. 2005 being KH2. Drop at 2006 is probably FEZ acquirement, although they bounced back with FF XII

For what i understand, so far, this is a very important moment in wich, any company can come and buy them, either for the PS, XBOX or Nintendo. Pretty much like what happen with Disney buying Lucasarts.

My bet is in PS or Nintendo, I think the XBOX might not be very interested in acquire it, since they might see this as too childish, unless they discover how popular and important can become.

Many years ago they presented a new concept on a shareholders conference. This concept (which name I forgot) was literally communicated as this:

“We will make more games on many plattforms, especially using our existing games and game series. These games will be cheap in production but we’ll make much more of them to bind fans and spread out production.
Our bigger titles will become cheaper in production and less emotionally involving, so our employees have less difficulties making them”

Not an actual quote, but I couldn’t find a source after so many years. This was decided even before they created all these spin-offs like FF7:cerberus.

we are on the point where SE only have 2 ip alive from before the merge, FF in one side and DQ in the other, and most of they games are iterations or spinoffs of those brands, but with enix’s gangan they had some very valuable properties wich they never put to good use; they beign a game company(FMA, souleater), but thats not a problem just of SE, i think out of the big gaming companies the only one still trying new ip’s for consoles is capcom and namcobandai, though the second one in much smaller scale.

SE’s inability to capture their western audience, on top of the failure of FF13 and FF14 sadly has them down for the count. The announcement that they were closing their development studio was them throwing in the towel. As the country and the world heads deeper into our recession this was perhaps the smartest move the could make.

Glad they admit it. Pretty much every game they’ve released after FFX-2 has been crap.

How about finally releasing interesting-looking new concept games like FF Type-0 and FF13 Versus instead of the same old rehashes and rereleases? How many different versions and ports of the first 4 FF games do we have to see until they’re done?

It was fun for the first few hours until the plot exploded into nonsense and the gameplay dumbed down into an automated walk-fest. I honestly can’t remember a single thing I liked other than the character designs.

Er, a major part of the problem is that Enix USA was disbanded in lieu of renaming Squaresoft USA Square Enix USA. This means there’s almost no Enix presence over on the US side of things, and thus no push to get things localized.

Fortunately, Iwata over at Nintendo disagrees with this stupidity, and is in a position to have Nintendo fix things.

I havent liked a single release since their merge. The good old squaresoft days. Im not sure if it is because the plots from the old ones are rehashed or if the old ones were just done better somehow but..

Old lady with bow and old mage being forced to go and slay good guys for money. Light is money, darkness is money, and crystals are throwing you, don’t try to touch them,look at them or think about them. Don’t look, it’s a Chokobo, he will eat your eyes, your stomach, your heart, your brain!! First Reality, 09 bucks, we won’t ever release this, because nobody will play this. Or not…

sad truth unfortunatly. they create a passable rpg and slap the famous name on it with some stuff here and there, expecting money. okay they got the money, however the name falls, as well as the expectations.
which is sad. the basics arent that hard and even if the series was in constant flux, they changed so much over the past three entries

“Grim Marine fights off alien/monster/unholy invasion, finds out his own side is borderline fascist, doesn’t care much.” Sound familiar? The Japanese are far from unique in having some very familiar stories, and if anything FF13 showed some deviation (female protagonist, every main character got an almost equal amount of screentime, major focus on character development as opposed to plot compared to previous FFs like 12, etc). I’m kinda sick of hearing this tired “every FF game is exactly the same” argument when it’s demonstrably false.

If they have a problem, it’s that they focused way too much on cheap portable games after 2004-5, which has completely diluted the power of brands like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. That they haven’t had any real good IPs in a long time hasn’t helped either, though.

Yeah, I’ve love for a return to the Square of 1997… Who remembers Bushido Blade? Ehrgeiz? Brave Fencer Musashi(Musashinden)? Einhander? Parasite Eve? And then… back to JRPGs… How much of that is there now? Death by Cube?

Thats just the Japanese way of doing things. Continue to venerate your elders even long after senility has set in. Its pretty much the reason why the Japanese game industry in general continues to lose ground in every market outside of Japan.

Ubisoft also never “promised” anything with Assassins Creed. Instead SE and MS got Don Mattrick to do the publicizing of FF13, in the most disgusting manner.

The results:
Loss of loyal customers, not because it went multi-platform on 360, but because SE flat out lied to their consumers.

Will you blame Sony when SE announced FF13 as an exclusive on PS3 and as a prime reason to buy one, yet take everything they said back and more?

By more I mean games like Last Remnant, where they promised to release it on PS3, but FAILED to do so and let it die in silence from lack of updates, never confirming if its cancelled or not, while supporting 360.

This only leads me to suspect that SE prioritized on MS’s 360 while “COMPLETELY” turning their backs on those who made them a household name in the 1990s and 2000s.

And while I don’t doubt the 360s popularity early this generation, by the time FF13 released, it was selling near equal to PS2 units.

SE doesn’t have a reason not to do FF14 good on PS3, because at the moment, they’re suffering from lack of credibility.

Are you actually this retarded or do you just play one on television? What goes on between Sony and MS has nothing to do with anything when it comes to the Japanese market. That’s an issue that really, only the shut-ins in the United States seem to really give two shits about. Considering that Xbox was basically a household brand for awhile there and Sony was a joke they made the smartest decision in the world.

Ubisoft took Assassins Creed from a PS exclusive to multi-console and they’ve only grown from there, making a crapload of money and the new IP has grown to a five part game series on consoles (not counting handhelds). Every damn company that’s gone multi-console has seen their profits grow from it. Except Square. Considering the mismanagement of FFXIV, the complete wreck that was the development of many of their new IPs this console generation and a staggering lack of innovation from them something tells me that is a bigger problem than where they get their money from.

Also you do realize that deal was ONLY for Final Fantasy XIII and they can do whatever they want right? That’s why we don’t have a FF compilations on the Xbox, that’s why we don’t have Kingdom Hearts games on the Xbox – they go where the money is. And apparently the money for your precious Kingdom Hearts games in the twelve year olds who are fangirls for Nintendo handhelds. So go blame Nintendo for that. Or would decrying a Japanese company insult your weebo senses?

It’s WADA. Kill him and put the Playstation loving “Square” part of the company back into the front line and focus.

Since Wada is Enix-centric, he obviously despised the PS brand and killed off FF’s fanbase with FF13 in 2008’s E3. Now they see that kissing Microsoft’s ass has backfired.

Remember that SE’s stock received a huge increase when FF 13 went to 360? I bet now they wish they never allowed themselves to have MS money in them. They CANT make an exclusive game on the PS3, because it would count as betraying MS’s money, and you know SE loves American cash. The only way they’d be allowed by the white man to release an exclusive on their own Japanese console is when XBox 720 is announced, and MS abandons the 360 the same way as the first Xbox.

Need proof? FF Versus 13, FF Type-0 outside Japan, lack of a Kingdom Hearts title on the PS systems this generation, and the deviation of the company to produce games connected or similar to the FFs that made them the most money on the PS platforms. Such as FF7’s conclusion, after Crisis Core, there was a confirmation of a sequel, but it never got made.

I agree that since Square was merged with Enix things haven’t necessarily improved, but this also doesn’t really take into account how the gaming industry has evolved and the signs of the times. I don’t actually know when their economy crashed, since it’s been worse than ours for longer supposedly, but development costs have increased exponentially due to newer consoles because gamers’ requirements for graphics have increased. There is no way to fight that.

The rehashing the same story thing is also a little bit of a misnomer. They did change the story, and people complained even though it was quite well executed because it wasn’t the same as the past. The stories are still creative and the characters still very memorable in their games, because we still crave that style of delivery, because it’s still very effective. It’s also evolved, but gamers are also, by and large, childish hypocrites.

Across the entire planet companies have stagnated due to economic and global fear. Anon 7:01 mentioned it well in representing how a great majority of the western market that has earned the greatest revenue is nothing but a mirror, or even a lesser quality mirror of Square Enix’s situation. Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s many bastard children are a great example of that.

The thing that eludes me is why can’t FF continue with its popularity while also newer IP are created? I found Last Remnant to be interesting, and was happy to see a different RPG from Square as well. Why do gamers always choose one or the other like its the only choice.

Yes, Activision and Blizzard don’t interfere with each other. One of the purposes of their merger is for tax efficiency, as well as potentially consolidating non-production related costs. It’s a merger technically speaking but in practice it’s run as if it were held by an umbrella company.

actually blizzard is not a good example since they were strong enough financially to not be assimilated by activision. Their contract dictates that activision shall not interfere with blizzard games. All the bad things that are attributed to activision about decline of quality in games like WoW are actually blizzard’s faults

On the other hand Ensemble studios which made Age of empire series and was devoured by microsoft few years after age of empires 3 is a better example

Gaming industry as a whole stagnates because AAA games are a REALLY expensive business, so publishers want to play it safe and risk-free, which means tons of sequels and clones of “genre kings”.

Unless we find some way to cut down AAA cost significantly, that trend will probably prevail. I hope the giants won’t fall and take the industry with them, because that would just hurt the medium as a whole, but I hope we’ll finally be able to stop chasing after the best graphics and instead focus on smaller, more focused games like Indies and many Kickstarter projects are trying to do.

I could give a crap if a big company bit the dust. I don’t think you’re giving enough credit to the smaller companies that make games that they think are cool ideas, not just to make money.

Granted I pretty much only play PC games, but that affords me the ability to play games from companies that would never have a chance on making it on a console. PCs will always be my platform of choice, it’s just too bad the game industry in Japan goes out of it’s way to prevent PC games from being popular.

Was not the case designers be old, but the Japanese market as a whole.
They make games with the approval of the company and investors, not just the desire of the author.
Was commented several times after bad reviews that the author did not agree with several changes made to the game!
Even the government has its share of blame for castrating games with censorship and in the worst hypotheses to prohibit the release.

The culprit of losing credibility is 100% of the decisions taken by the board!
Suzuki took wrong decisions and now blames others 😛
A pity the Square end that way ..

All the “young blood” are being labeled by their elders as hikikomori for daring to openly show an iota of pleasure from playing any form of video games, watching any anime or reading any manga. Doesn’t matter one whit if the game is an eroge, a JRPG, a WRPG or an FPS; the anime a service anime like To Love Ru or Training w/ Hinako, or a serious series like Cowboy Bebop or GITS; the manga, S&M fap fodder like Nana To Kaoru or Domina Na Do, or a slightly more serious series like The World God Only Knows or Noblesse.

The social stigma of this label causes them to either lose their jobs or become unable to get a job in the first place, causes everyone who knows them to shun them and refuse to give them so much as the time of day… and causes them to hole themselves in a small apartment, never leaving except to buy basic sustenance supplies (read:microwavable food and instant ramen) and generally wind up as hikikomori, isolating themselves from society until the lack of human contact drives them to suicide.

The handful of young blood who get labeled as hikikomori by their elders but refuse to fulfill the otherwise self-fulfilling prophecy end up getting arrested for daring to enter the line of sight of any female who either is a JC/JK or knows the elders who say he’s a hikikomori.

This is actually considered pretty common knowledge. Turnover in Square-Enix is actually a bit too low. I remember Warning!! A Huge Podcast had something quite a while ago about how part of why SE isn’t getting the talent they need is because their lower-level staff are highly specialized and regimented to try and keep other companies from poaching their top talent. Like there was supposedly a woman that they had on staff and her only job was to render roads. They referred to her as ‘Cobblestone Girl.’

Crappy games can also give them profit like Good games would, moreover they much more easier to produce unlike good games. You don’t always need good games to make profit so what Anon 03:39 said is very much true because many game companies choose this path.

now open up google or youtube in new tab and search “Ea in a nutshell” you’ll get the idea.

I must say that I don’t know whether it’s Square’s fault or Enix’s fault.

To be fair, Enix made good games. (Star Ocean/Valkyrie Profile)

Square has made a LOT of really big financial mistakes, but most of them were with THEIR OWN GAMES. (Final Fantasy X-2… XI… XIII-1… Lack of a Kingdom Hearts 3… Then again they really did mess Star Ocean up pretty bad as well with 4: Last Hope.

And let’s see… there was that movie in 2001 that cost them tremendous amounts of money with no real direction… A stupid anime series in 2004 was it: Final Fantasy: Unlimited…

This was a company that was ruining their reputation long before Enix showed up.

Also, they picked up other companies that they could have saved money on like that one that created “Fantasy Earth Zero”. God, I love that game, but Square Enix probably could have done without both the game company that made them no money, and the music composer that “ruined Final Fantasy XII” by most critic’s standards.

Square should do us all a favor and close it’s doors… Final Fantasy XIV:Reborn becomes the FINAL FANTASY. 14. XV will never happen.

Star Ocean & Valkyrie Profile are made by Tri-Ace, the same developer who made Resonance of Fate (I LOVE THIS TITLE!!). Square-Enix is just the one who pays the money.

Please remember, Square-Enix is primarily a publisher, NOT a developer! The only game series that SE really develop themselves are Fabula Nova Crystallis (ie. the FF series), and Kingdom hearts. Even dragon quest is not made by them (they took part in it but it’s really a five companies project).

Enix was primarily a publisher, not a developer (Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile were developed by Tri-Ace). The merger mostly just brought Square the Dragon Quest name.

However, the Dragon Quest series has long clung to its retro roots, and has had problems reinventing itself for modern gamers (see DQ 9&10), though personally I think they nailed it with 8.

Similarly, Square can’t seem to figure out what direction to take the Final Fantasy series in (see every Final Fantasy game since 10).

In the end, I think the two biggest factors contributing to the decline of Square are the departure of Sakaguchi, and the company’s recent focus on short term gain by shoveling out a large number of sequels and spinoffs of lesser quality, which has diluted the Final Fantasy brand.

They’ve milked the Final Fantasy series for what it’s worth, and have moved on to Kingdom Hearts. Without a new series to exploit after that, the future of the company is uncertain.

I don’t think square should shut it’s doors, but really it does seem like the bad decisions were being made on the Square side, so it’s likely they’d be in the same place if they’d managed to get this far without absorbing Enix and Eidos.

Personally, I think Square-Enix needs to rearrange their affairs, and get some good development teams in place. Then they need to focus on shipping products in their game division. They should probably get an MMORPG team that works on FFXI and FFXIV, a team that works with external dev companies on handheld games like FFtype0, a two teams that work exclusively on major projects like major FF games and Kingdom Hearts, a small team that just makes sure the company’s entire back catalog is on everything ever, and a team headed by the SaGa guy that cranks out mid-budget big idea experiments that could either become a major franchise or make their way into them in bits and chunks.

Its most likely squares fault, they need to stop rehashing the same titles/series and do something new for a change. All of the Enix games have sold well compared to square titles when you look at squares projected sales, then their actual sales. They need to keep sales up to keep their profit margins, I also think FF14 was a huge hit on their profits considering they have probally spent a fortune remaking the game bascally from scratch, and remaking a mmo is not like making a single player game, its much more costly for the mmo.

Just FYI, FF13 series already sold more than the entire Star Ocean + Valkyrie Profile franchise combined. Yes, FF13 also did a little better than FF12.
Just because you didn’t like some of the FF games you mentioned doesn’t mean it didn’t sell.

Some people thinks that SE going down because they didn’t make a good game, thus no sales. For me, that’s wrong.
The biggest problem with SE isn’t with the games not selling, but with the market changing.

And why are you bringing FF movie and anime? do you even see the graph? Do you know that SE also involved in Index, FMA, Star Driver, etc?

they made a lot of financial mistakes but X-2, XI, and XIII-1 weren’t 3 of them.

hate to break it to you and those that want to continue believing XIII (and even XIII-2 for that matter) lost S-E a ton of money but the fact is it made S-E plenty of money.
you can claim XIII sold only because of the FF name, and not because of quality, but that’s irrelevant in regards to whether it made money or not.
it still sold 6.6 million copies.
you’re an idiot if you’re still insisting that’s a financial failure.

X-2 likewise was considered a financial success at 5.3 million copies. anyone that told you it was considered a commercial failure (now or at that time) is clueless.

and XI has made more money than any Square/Square-Enix game in their history, so how you can attribute that as their financial misstep is mind-boggling.
shall we call Skyrim Bethesda’s great financial failure?

some spin-offs with questionable quality.
a movie pushed through by an overly ambitious series producer that literally bankrupted Squaresoft.
THOSE were major financial missteps.

those 3 games were of mixed critical reception in the fan base, but financially?
they made millions.

YOU’RE clueless. You’re confusing sales with profits. If a company’s ever-overconfident dumbass CEO makes them produce 10 million copies of a game, then they’re still going to take a huge loss on it even if it sells 6.6 million copies. Especially when most of those copies they did move off the shelves were sold at a small fraction of the launch price.

Yea, see, X-2 was totally a failure. They made money off a game that completely debased women everywhere. Anyone who likes that game thinks women are fucking retards. WOMEN who like that game should be fucking ashamed of themselves. 13 was the straw that has me saying I’m not buying from square enix ever again. Alienating your fanbase is fail.

And thus finally your childish, ignorant stupidity shines forth in all its glory.

I don’t like it, therefore it’s shit.

The Fayth were never fully explained, and consciousness in that world is such that how we perceive death and how it occurred there are not the same.

“Tidus is supposed to be dead” is a bad argument anyway. He was, so be happy. Now he’s not, so be happy again because he and Yuna get to be together. Best of all worlds. You got your tears for FFX and then got to see the happy ending.

That of course is without even going into the retardation of them making x-2 to begin with, BECAUSE TIDUS SHOULD BE DEAD. Fucking ruins X for me, because it was this build up about how someone was GOING TO DIE. Then Tidus lives even though he is fucking from within the Fayth, THEN LIVES IN THE OCEAN FOR A YEAR before being found. No, X-2 is shit, will always be shit and trying to say otherwise just means that your opinion has absolutely no value to me.

Yea uh, as someone who’s been watching anime for quite a while, and playing JRPG’s for even longer, those jokes ARE failed, BECAUSE they are terrible and demeaning. This is a WHOLE FUCKING YEAR later, if Yuna still needs distracting from the guy she knew for 2 weeks then clearly we need to fix something here. Name those anime please. Name them now. I have no fucking clue what anime it is you are talking about where the guy gets two words, and then makes the totally ASSININE choice in how to combine them. Please show me the anime, where the guy goes and steals something, then is chastised and told to return it by a woman, even though stealing is basically the job. They didn’t try to make it light hearted, THEY TRIED TO MAKE IT CHARLIES ANGELS for crying out loud.

Seriously? You guys can’t tell why that game is demeaning to women? Ok lets start with Yuna. She’s now a “sphere hunter” looking for Tidus. So far not so bad. An intelligent girl in FFX all things considered. Ok, fast forward to when you go sphere hunting the first time, in the Ruins of Zanarkand. Here we learn that Yuna is now apparently the stupidest person in the game. You have two pieces of a word. Mon, and Key. What does she say? KEYMON. Are you fucking kidding me? Lets fast forward some more.

When Yuna and crew steal the sphere from the temple. Brother chastises them for doing so telling them they HAVE to give it back. Why? Because stealing is wrong. Fuck, that, noise. That’s all a sphere hunter is about, stealing things from other people. Yuna and crew don’t tell him to shove it down his noise hole and then go do that. I’m honestly not going to go on about this any further, but its this sort of shit that characterizes the game as one that should be despised.

I don’t mind the “dress up” or the fact that it was an all female cast. One of my favourite FF games is 5 and those who know that game know it was a 1 male 3 female cast at the end.

So in conclusion no its not for the stupid retarded reasons you guys thought when I said women should hate this game. This game makes out Yuna to be a fucking moron, who doesn’t mind being bossed around by Brother because… I still don’t know why she lets him get away with that shit.

How exactly did they debase women with an entirely female main cast taking lead rolls and fighting enemies while overcoming their pasts… I mean honestly… are you seriously sitting there with that nonsense and attempting to say that X-2 was sincerely debasing women? Because of what? Because of the shorts? Because they were having fun occasionally in a way that was a bit girlish? Because Yuna missed someone she loved?

Actually no, if you still haven’t figured it out, then you are an embarrassment. If you’re a man, you’re pathetic, if you’re a woman, you debase women more than that game did. In no way did it debase women at all if you even bothered to play it. I won’t defend it as some groundbreaking game, but you are absolutely worthless to any arguments relating to gaming at this point.

…those are even worse reasons for crying out loud! Have you ever even seen an anime or JRPG? The situations you’re describe are just jokes that didn’t work, not demeaning to women! I can give you dozens of instances where it’s a male character in exactly the same context in anime and games, but do I go on about it being demeaning to men?

No, I don’t, even though I am getting sick of the stupid male protagonist, and so are most people, which is why more intelligent ones are coming about. Only women who lack perspective and the pussified men that doggedly follow their brainless idealism can possibly see that crap as demeaning to women except for the veeeery slim context that they’d never seen that Japanese joke set up before. Like Patrice O’neal, I won’t defend a bad joke, but bad jokes and good jokes come from the same birth, so I will not ever hold it against them for trying, but I will not acknowledge it as good.

And Brother chastising them is obviously yet another joke that didn’t work. In the context of the game anyway, Yuna is not really trying to be a thief anyway, she’s just stuck between trying to live in the present and the fact that there is something she senses that tells her it’s not over which she faces the entire game. All the initial stuff was her desperate attempts to distract herself. Whether the execution was good to you or not, that was the case, and they tried to bury it in anime lightheartedness that didn’t work as well as they had hoped. Yet somehow you had already decided it was demeaning to women, because otherwise you’d have noticed all of that if you had paid attention.

If anything you should find the men who follow the idiocy of your statements more demeaning to women, because they’re the ones who are lying to get laid.

You’re a fucking idiot. The game released in North America & Europe months AFTER the merger. But not in Japan. All they did was switch an FMV clip & change the packaging, while localizing the game for the western markets.

And it doesn’t matter how long it took to make FFX-2, it doesn’t change the fact that the game was programmed & went gold before the merger was completed.

you must be out of your mind, or not know your gaming history, Enix was know to be one of the best developers of theor time before the merger, most of the games theyve developed people would remember as great games while square on the other hand had always had a number of ups and downs, anyone with ANY knowledge of past games would know that when the merger was anounced most people were worried square would ruin enix, even more so when people heard alot of enix’s staff were getting “reorganised”. not to mention the games you quote as enixs best days and worst days are some of squares usual trash. almost nothing ive payed from square can compare to the depth and enjoyment i had from star ocean 1 and 2, the only games square brought out that stand a chance they ruined with terrible seaquels and piss poor remakes (they really should have left tactics ogre alone, and FFTactics was good when it had a more serious story)

A CHAIN is only as strong as it’s weakest link. An Olympic sprinting team is as fast as its fastest runner. A relay race team is as fast as the average of their combined speed. A cyclist racing team is fact faster than any of their individuals members.

Unless we know how the merger reorganized Square and Enix it’s impossible to say that Enix ruined Square.

Enix never made a Squaresoft level game, not even close. Enix was on a MUCH lower level than Square was, and they brought them down hard. A team is only as good as its weakest member and after they merged they could only achieve Enix level games on their best day(FF12), and acidic bloody shit on their worst (FF13).

That’s very strange, as FF9 was a Playstation game, whereas the Sqaure-Enix merger occurred well into the Playstation 2’s life time. It’s hard to imagine Square re-releasing FF9 that late into the PS2’s cycle.

X-2 was released nearly a month before the merger, you idiot. And an RPG does not magically appear out of nowhere, it takes many, many months of work to develop an RPG. Shit was developed long before the merger and you’re just too stupid to realize that, cause it’s easier to blame someone else [Enix] than admit Squaresoft turned into a huge piece of shit on their own. You’re also one of those faggots that think Squaresoft “belongs” on a Sony game console because you never owned a SNES.

not sir, you are wrong. Square-enix first appearence was on 2003 (ffviii was on 199x i can´t remember the exact date), and the first game of square enix was ffX-2 when the compañy start to downfall. just look at you FFX game, what does it say, squaresoft or square enix?

Just tell Tri-ace to make Valkyrie Profile 3, make more Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre games, god with all that money you have (had) hire professional writers to make good stories and people who have experience in PLAYING roleplaying games.

Also start making something new instead of rehashing everything over and over again. Oh and Just Cause 3 already and make it mass multi-player like the modders did with JC2. So many ways for them to bring profits up, yet they ignore them all!

This. Their biggest problem is that they have gone for a decade completely ignoring their fans and churning out garbage that no one wants, profiting purely on nostalgia. If any other game company had published those same games under any other brand name, they’d be forgotten and go straight in the GameStop bargain bin.